Enhancing the SMW Mobile Experience

If you’re accessing Social Media Week from your phone, then you’re probably already familiar with our mobile website. But here’s a little background that you may not be familiar with.

Originally launched ahead of the February 2012 event, SMW’s mobile website has delivered nearly half a million pages of information to visitors from 151 countries and handled more than 17K event registrations. There were more than 110K individual event page views during the February 2012 event alone, providing attendees with access to maps to event venues, event descriptions, speaker information and more.

We’ve rolled out a number of enhancements to the Social Media Week mobile website as we head towards the September 2012 event and recently discussed the enhancements with the team that made it happen: Todd Shingler of Mobile Perspectives and Rob Leishman of New Media Innovation.

What were some of the main focus areas in enhancing the Social Media Week mobile website?

One major area of focus has been improving the integration between the Social Media Week mobile website and the Social Media Week mobile apps to enable a more seamless experience. The SMW mobile app leverages the SMW mobile website to enable event registration and to let attendees access their list of registered events. Working alongside with the mobile app developers we have enabled Silent-Sign On so that SMW Mobile App users are automatically logged in to the SMW Mobile Website and can directly register for events without having to go through a separate logon process.

We’ve also customized the SMW mobile website pages that are displayed within the SMW Mobile Apps to remove duplicative elements such as banners and navigation menus, yielding a cleaner, more intuitive user experience.

Another area of focus has been improving the user experience for Windows Phone devices to better cater for nuances (or provide IE-specific alternatives) in how the embedded Internet Explorer browser renders certain style directives such as font sizes, background images and transparency.

Other enhancements to the SMW mobile website include a newly designed event schedule layout, an event category filter, an updated event page layout, inclusion of addition general information pages (e.g. FAQs, statistics from the February event), and giving local host cities an option to have their own presence on the mobile website similar to that found on the full Social Media Week website. We’ve also extended the social media widget to include links to Social Media Week’s Google+ and Pinterest pages.

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Building the SMW mobile browser experience was no small task. Both companies have a strong history of creating powerful mobile experiences. What other new & exciting projects are you working on or recently completed?

RL: New Media Innovation was recently selected by Qantas airlines to help them rapidly launch new productivity saving Applications via our new Application Cloud platform. The Application Cloud platform integrates to a multitude of backend systems and allows Qantas to expose key functionality in a secure way to both internal staff and customers on Mobile, Tablet, Web and other Touch Devices. We’ve enjoyed a long partnership with Qantas, where we also power their Mobile Check-in solution.

Separately, we’ve been rolling out multi-channel communication portals for a number of schools throughout Australia – enabling web and mobile access to school calendars, bulletins, lunch menus, and enabling purchase of school uniforms and other accessories.

TS: Mobile Perspectives continues to work on a range of projects outside of Social Media Week – developing mobile strategy roadmaps for larger enterprises, helping small business owners roll out mobile websites and embrace mobile marketing, and developing technology training courses on topics such as mobile device management and cloud computing that were delivered to mobile operators.

This year’s theme for Social Media Week is Empowering Change Through Collaboration – it sounds like Collaboration has played a key role in the evolution of the Social Media Week mobile website.

Definitely. Beyond the close collaboration between Mobile Perspectives and New Media Innovation in developing the mobile website, we’ve also built great relationships with CrowdCentric, XOMO Digital (the SMW Mobile Application developers), Techliminal (responsible for the core SMW web and registration platforms) and with other SMW partners – all of whom have enthusiastically embraced a collaborative working style with a common goal of improving the on-the-go attendee experience. For example, we worked closely with XOMO to design the automatic sign on and custom page layout functionality to improve the Event registration process for SMW Application users. XOMO set up a project on 37 Signals’ BaseCamp online platform that we used to track tasks and deliverables and we made extensive use of Google Docs for collaborative document editing.

Make sure you check out our mobile site and let us know what you think!